Teaching basic lab skillsfor research computing

What If Scientists Didn't Compete?

Interesting summary in the New York Times of some collaborative science done by Dr. Sean Cutler. One of the goals of this course is to give scientists the skills they need to do things like this routinely. This raises a few questions:

Should one of the "graduation exercises" for the course be to write some kind of search tool (or a wrapper around several search tools)? Finding potential collaborators is sometimes the biggest challenge.

Should more emphasis be placed on sharing and merging data sets? Or on looking for inconsistencies in them?

What else do you need to be able to do in order to collaborate more effectively with your colleagues?